A dream is a desire, an authority against which we rebuke ourselves. A story, passage against night. When we woke a gecko threaded itself across the woven ceiling. Fresh eggs and papaya for breakfast. The ceiling is not blue but an elaboration of yellows cascading toward. Blue heat, feathered toes of the gecko where it hangs from the rafters, hunting. Cotton, resist stamped in blue. A pressure against which we weave, or are woven: lion god dancing toward the temple. Dream of monkeys, smoke rising above canopied green. A dream, or desire. Water ache poured from a long-handled cup. Another rebuke. Cold. When we woke, elaboration of desires, sweetening heat of banana jaffle. Or stories. Rough chatter of hens and kitchen fires, bull-form sarcophagi entomb the dead. A passage or dream of night, which is another. Blue, feather cascade of stars. Yellow defines an idea of the light. Or traces its circumference. Rebuke, or resist, an idea which is itself blue. This is not (or is) a story, I am telling. A dream of breakfast, and the dead. Dream tracing the circumference of desire. We drowse on the veranda, air ripe with heat and the broad smooth leaves of banana. A pressure of blue and yellow. When we. Counterpressure to the elaboration of another. Authority. Wake, blue, a feather. Cascade, or collapse. Resistance amid the rough chatter of definition.

kishuf

"If you see a generation over whom the heavens are rust-colored like copper so that neither rain nor dew falls, it is because that generation is wanting in whisperers. What is the remedy? Let them go to someone who knows how to whisper." The Talmud: Ta'anit 8a

1

kishuf water lily, yellow

water iris

pickerel

hyacinth

water flutters

splashes

into itself

mutterings of

heaven

cypress (kishuf

giving form to

formlessness

mirror of heaven

lily leaves drift over its surface

yellow

water iris

blue

pickerel

score its mirror

brilliant orange flashes

hycinth, beside lily

2

hyacinth, hyaline, sweet

taste of

burnt:

orange and yellow mirror (mirror), a

question splashes

into itself

form and formlessness

heaven

matters of

definition

or imagination

a drifting of leaves over a surface

the cat

hunting in a mirror

3

leaf mirror

(voicing a score of others

memory flutters over its surface

matterless

whispering under a rust-colored sky

mutters like a good

jew

a god, this majik

language translating itself into silence

babel (the gate of god

enters by means of

a language of flowers

a question issuing itself into the air

tumult of delight

water hyacinths

forbidden,

forgiven

alterations of intention

water forgives the mirror

reflecting itself

an irrelevant question

this precise collaboration of forms

of blue and yellow

of blue

yellow water iris scores

the heavens

making a

muttering of its own

4

hyaline, hyades

light re-

fracted through a confluence of

mirrors

a lens or remedy

pointellist

v of light

a scattering of light

these

daughters of darkness

a glass through which alternations

of intention move

refracting and muttering

rainmakers

daughters of

heaven

5

water mutters even in darkness

even in darkness

when the rust-colored sky is obliterated

kishuf mutters

calling to the air

whispering to her daughters

arrow shaped leaves

spikes of

blue violet flowers

score the air, muttering

the language of mirrors

chanting

such voices of fish or flowers, of green

swords knifing the air

Elegy

When warriors put on light woven armor,

Swords are the color of smooth salt

And bows groan and wail,

And bending spears are wet.

Al-Khansia (Iraq 575-646)

When warriors put on light

When warriors put on armor of oaths and allegations

Their swords are the color of smooth salt

When warriors put on armor woven of vengeance

When their swords torment them with longing

The sun rides among them as a warrior itself

When warriors put on swords

When warriors grasp swords the color of smooth salt

They groan and wail with desire

When warriors put on swords, whet and honed with longing

When warriors are the goads of faithless lovers

Desire binds their cries

When warriors wear the arguments of avenging saints

When warriors chastise the unworthy

Their swords are the arc of justice

When warriors advance beyond reproach

When warriors determine to punish the dishonorable

Light dances upon their swords

When warriors put on swords the color of smooth salt

When warriors chant their vengeance over the desert

Howitzers and cruise missiles rain upon Basra

When sword-songs rain upon Baghdad

When cities burn and tumble in the schirrocco of their song

Their song has the savor of salt

When mothers put on mourning

When wailing bends the light rising out of city ruins

Theirs is the garment of liberation

When warriors put on armor woven of justice

When swords thrust liberation

Death swims in their dark wake, devouring both blade and sorrow

When the sun vanquishes even the sound of arms

When the sun makes the sand a retina-burning lens

Light is neither a threat or a promise

The taste of smooth salt is all that relieves the torment of light.

Garden of Delight

for Darrell Bourque

"A vein of sapphires

hides in the earth,

a sweetness in fruit"

Mahadevuyakka

(12th c., India)

1

a vein of sweetness in the earth

in sapphire fruit

in globes of lemon flesh

a fire of blossom at its feet

in sweet tree

in iridescent wings

a tang of sweet fire and heat

in honeyed earth

in mouths of sapphire flesh

an earth of juice and warm air roiling

in hidden tumult

in sweet mouth

a blossom on the tongue

in lemon fire

in vein of earthy madder

a mouth of heat and light

in sapphire blossom

in globes of honeyed scent

a tongue of sweetness

in hummingbird air

in sapphire wings

a tumult of blossom and sweet tree

a fire of flesh

in veins of earth and light

a lemon sweetness roils, gives way to fire

in sapphire mouth

in honeyed tongue

in iridescent wings

in earthly veins

a tumult of fire dances in the air

2

an air of fire in the tumult

in sapphire veins

in wings of lemon tongue

a mouth of fire at its sweetness

in sweet light

in iridescent earth

veins of sweet flesh and fire

in honeyed tree

in blossom of sapphire tumult

wings of air and warm sweetness roiling

in hidden tongue

in sweet scent

globes on the blossom

in lemon light

in heat of earthy mouth

a madder of vein and fire

in sapphire tongue

in blossom of honeyed mouth

a tumult of air

in hummingbird juice

in sapphire earth

a flesh of mouths and sweet earth

a heat of fire

in tang of wings and tree

lemon feet roil, gives way to blossom

in sapphire fire

in honeyed flesh

in iridescent globes

in earthly fruit

an earth of sweetness dances in the vein

Negotiation with place

Topos, to articulate a means of entry, a sanction against trespass: consensual knife-edged opening. Topos, Atchafalaya water way, silt, alligators. Bayou threads imperceptible over cypress knees. From Choctaw bayuk. A removed people, a tracery of languages left in their absence: litany of sensation or impression. Swamp lilies and bald cypress, salt domes, water moccasins, sticky clay. Humidity.

Topos. Relation between particulars of local and its human inhabitants, we enter a world defined by. Experience of language itself: Teche, Arcady, Catahoula, Natchez. That surface, a response or collaboration, hybrid of human and other-than-human. Synthesis. Water oak and woodcocks, M. de Iberville, War of 1812, tupelo gum, zydeco, crawfish, swamp lilies. Intersection across a temporal gradient.

Bare branches draw a pale refusal, irritable beneath an absent sun: charter of stillness, an opening overhead in the dissolution of leaves. In the absent canopy, black and white warblers, flashing brilliance of, prints like small hands (augere, to increase: litany of imprecision.) A negotiation with place

Language rustles, dry in the wind where cold etches yellowed grass. Empties the air. Composition of wet clay and oak. Roots assume a quiet determination. A space shaped by the persistence of rain, or raccoons. Small hands worked into the earth, their tracery a sentence forming at the edge of memory.

Leaves and their absence, recollection a process of accretion or sedimentation. Bare trees efface the distinction between sky and horizon. In their refusal to abide by the darkness of winter, vines cling, asserting a motion forward as well as back. Twining. Light-washed trunks of water oaks and ashes. Motion

Forward: augment, a vowel or a lengthening of the vowel. Winter refuses to participate. Canon piecing together stillness and motion, cold and the directed movement of low pressures along a gradient. Warblers and the flashing brilliance of. Language moves on a current of memory, or air.